Panem Falls No More
by passionately-curious
Summary: <html><head></head>There is no life for me without the Doctor. Looking back, I don't know that there was much of a life for me before I stepped into that blue box with him. Before he spoke his first words to me. "Stay alive." He repeated those words when he sent me away. "If you can do one thing for me, Katniss Everdeen, you stay alive. Against all odds, you stay alive."</html>


**AN:** This idea came to me one night and I couldn't stop. I'm a huge fan of both franchises so I hope I did it some justice. In the Who-verse, this takes place at the end of "The Parting of the Ways" and the beginning of "The Christmas Invasion" though, really, I changed a lot of the second part to make it my own little universe. Thanks to optimus-pam for helping me out with this! I hope you enjoy!

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><p>I have experienced this before. The cold that seeps through all your limbs and leaves you unable to think clearly. Or feel anything other than nothingness. I feel useless. He sent me away. The Doctor sent me back to my home so many years and miles from him to protect me. With no one there to protect him. My family tries to cheer me up, my mother, my sister, even Gale, tell me that life will go on without him. That I can start over and have a normal existence like everyone else.<p>

They don't understand. There is no life for me without the Doctor. Looking back, I don't know that there was much of a life for me before I stepped into that blue box with him. Before he spoke his first words to me. _Stay alive_. He repeated those words when he sent me away. _If you can do one thing for me, Katniss Everdeen, you stay alive. Against all odds, you stay alive._

I could stay alive while he died at the hands of the Capitol Mutts. The same Mutts he fought off and destroyed his own people for. The only creatures I've ever seen that caused a flicker of fear to cross his features. Saved from the Dark Days by the Emperor, Coriolanus Snow, damaged but rebuilt. The Doctor was going to fight them again. Him alone against a fleet of renewed Mutts with one goal. To destroy. To kill. To exterminate their enemies. And the Doctor is their number one enemy.

He is brave. And what am I doing? Sitting in the Hob, letting my stew get cold because I've got no appetite while those around me prattle on about new shifts in the mines or whatever it is they're talking about. I am a coward. I should have fought harder to stay with him. Because while the Doctor was often cross and grumpy and too reliant on any form of intoxicating liquid he could get a hold of, he was still the Doctor. He protected me and the Earth and all of humankind over and over. He showed me a better way of living, taught me to not just give up and let things happen. Make a stand. Say no. Do the right thing. Stay alive.

"Stay alive," I whisper, mostly to myself but I catch the attention of my sister.

"Katniss?" She asks, but I'm already out of my seat and running out the door to where the TARDIS dropped me.

To those who don't understand, it doesn't belong, this giant blue police box in the middle of a wild meadow. But of all the places the Doctor intended it to land and stay, it's perfect. It was the first place we met, the Doctor and I. And it's where we always landed when we popped in for a visit. This is her home. Our home now, I suppose.

"You can't spend the rest of your life thinking about him," Gale says, coming up to me, placing a hand on my shoulder. "He's given you the gift of your life back, Katniss. He's given you back to me. If...you still wanted me."

I turn to him, unsure what to say. When I left the first time, he was so angry. He didn't understand who the Doctor was or where I was going or what I was going to do. But he traveled with us once, he saw what we saw and knew what was happening in this world. The Doctor changed him so much. But he wasn't enough. Nothing in this life would be enough anymore. "Gale, I-"

A bird flies overhead and lands on the top edge of the TARDIS. Black with white markings under it's wings. I've seen this bird before, many times before, during my travels with the Doctor. _A Mockingjay_.

"A mockingjay," I repeat, as more mockingjays flock to the TARDIS.

Gale stares at them in disbelief. "They're just a thing of legend, Katniss. They can't be..."

I shake my head. Legend, perhaps, but I have seen so much that cannot be true to know there is more. "I've seen them before," I tell him. "There was one...Oh!" I cry out. "With the Doctor! The station he's on, the space station, it's called Mockingjay! It's a sign, Gale!" I run toward the TARDIS staring up at the birds the entire time.

"A sign?" Gale calls after me. "Of what?"

He finds me staring at the console. "That I'm not supposed to be here. That I'm supposed to be with the Doctor." I let out a laugh that feels too much like one of the Doctor's for my comfort. "We need to get back, old girl," I tell the console.

"You said you can't. Said the Doctor locked it."

"Remember the last time, Gale, with the Avox? There was that light from the middle, from the heart, the Doctor said. It saw what the Avox wanted and gave it to her. If we can get the middle open again and I look into it, I can go back." I'm still staring at the console, but I feel Gale's grey eyes boring into me. I know what he's thinking. If I go back, I'll die. I'm choosing the Doctor over him.

"Okay," he says quietly. "I've got an idea."

He leaves me alone in the TARDIS, allowing me to shed my first few tears for my mad plan and my mad Doctor. I don't know if this will work. Emergency Protocol One may override any attempts to open the heart and return, but I've got to try. I can hear the Doctor's voice in my head, scoffing at me. _Took you long enough, Sweetheart_.

I hear the rumbling of heavy machinery coming my way. Looking out, it's Gale in the front seat of an ancient mining tractor. "Here," he says when he comes close enough. He tosses a heavy chain that's connected to the tractor toward her. "Hook it up."

I want to say something to him, to thank him for doing this, but I know Gale. He's too proud, it would hurt his ego more to mention this, so I stay quiet. And when he feels the pressure from the chain being hooked to the console, I hear him give the tractor as much power as it can take.

The console bursts open and the chain snaps in two. The TARDIS door slams shut, filling the box with a gold light that I am unable to look away from.

"_Katniss! What have you done?" The Doctor calls out. "You aren't supposed to be here!"_

"_I am the Mockingjay. I come as your savior. I'm here to protect you, Doctor."_

"_What is this abomination?" The Muttation with gold fur and emerald eyes asks, baring it's poison claws._

_The Mockingjay turns her attention to the beast. "I am what was never intended to be. I am the destroyer of worlds, the bringer of life."_

"_Katniss -" the Doctor reaches for the Mockingjay. "How?"_

"_I looked into the TARDIS and the TARDIS looked into me. We saw that we were pure. We saw that we were strong. She gave me wings. I made her fly. I am the Mockingjay," she repeats, staring at the name on the space station. "I scattered these words and symbols across space and time. A message to lead myself here."_

"_Katniss, the time vortex was never meant to be absorbed by a human."_

_The Emperor chuckles from the relative safety of his own ship. "The pathetic Doctor is right, Girl, the power of the vortex will kill you. You're going to burn."_

"_If I burn you will burn with me," the Mockingjay answers. "The Dark Days end now." She stretches her arms out and the energy from the TARDIS whip past her and into space, enveloping all the Muttations and their ships in the golden light. "I have protected you. My Doctor."_

"_You've got to stop now, Sweetheart. You've got to give it up." The Doctor rises to his feet and reaches out one last time for her._

"_It hurts," the Mockingjay confesses, tears streaming down her face. "It's killing me."_

_The Doctor reaches out and laces his fingers through hers. "Stay alive, Katniss. You need to stay alive." The energy transfers out of the Mockingjay and into his body. She collapses into his arms and he rushes her back into the TARDIS, returning the vortex to the heart. The doors close and the familiar whirr of the blue box takes them away._

I don't know where I'm at when I finally come to. Or how exactly I landed on the floor of the TARDIS with the Doctor. "What happened?" I ask. "The last thing I remember was you sending me home...I was in here...no..." I look up at him. He's actively avoiding my eyes. "Doctor?"

"Haymitch," he says quietly. "It's not my proper name, of course. But there was a time when I was living amongst your kind and I took on the name, Haymitch."

"What-"

He glances down at his hand and I can see wisps of the same gold light surrounding it. "I wanted to tell you, before I go. I wanted to tell someone, so someone knew. I liked that name, Haymitch, nothing special, nothing remarkable, but it was mine. Oh, Katniss Everdeen, the places we were going to go."

"We still could," I say hesitantly, rising up from the floor. "We're both here."

"Not for long," he answers, closing his eyes in pain. "Not like this at least. This whole process is a bit...unpredictable." He doubles over in pain as more gold light shoots out from him. "Don't touch me!" He shouts as I tried to help him. "Katniss, you can't..."

"What's going on?"

"You're a stupid girl, you know that. Foolhardy is more like it. But then again, I'm kind of a fool as well." He says with a smile. "You absorbed all the energy of the TARDIS right then and I took it back from you. And it's killing me, cell by cell."

"Killing you?" I ask, my stomach clenching in fear. I already dealt with the thought of losing the Doctor once and now it's happening again. "You can stop it, can't you? I mean, you're you."

He smirks. "Not indefinitely. We have this trick to cheat death, prolong ourselves a little bit longer than time should allow. Such is the gift of being a Time Lord. So no, I'm not going to die. But luckily for you, I'm going to change into someone completely different." He winces again, the gold light growing stronger around him. "But before...before I do..."

"Doctor. Haymitch," she pleaded.

"Before I go, you need to know that...you're a fool. But you're the only one who could have done the things you've done. It was always going to be you, Katniss Everdeen. You. And me. What a pair we made, huh, Sweetheart?"

Gold light bursts out of his body, knocking me back to the floor. I shield my eyes as he is swallowed up by the energy field, only his last words remaining. The TARDIS darkens and I struggle to open my eyes, gasping at who is standing before me. Gone is the paunchy, middle-aged man who had seen more war and destruction than anyone should, replaced by a young man who appears to be about my age, with pale skin, wavy blonde hair, and bright blue eyes that sparkle anew.

"Hello," he says, pausing to take note of the way he sounds. "Oh that's different, isn't it. Not quite so grumpy and grumbly, is it? Much younger as well...and a little...huh...I feel shorter." He looks over at me. "Am I shorter?"

I nod, this man is a few inches shorter than my Doctor.

"Right. That's doable. Been worse," he laughs at his own joke. "Wait. I'm...oh." And with that, the man collapses against the floor of the TARDIS.

* * *

><p>"Katniss, you need to explain who this strange man is laying in your bed!"<p>

I wince at my mother's tone, knowing it was only a matter of time before she started grilling me. Being a nurse, she looked over him as best as she could, given that he was still completely alien and could have who knows what happening internally. Gale, who is sitting next to me on my mother's couch, snickers until I elbow him in the ribs, making him spill his tea.

"He's...the Doctor," I mumble into my own cup.

"Speak up," she insists in a tone I haven't heard since I was a child.

I pull the cup down and set it on the coffee table in front of us. "He's the Doctor," I answer more clearly. "I think."

Prim and my mother stare at me in disbelief. Gale laughs openly. "Katniss, seriously? Come on, the Doctor was that older guy who always smelled like booze and annoyed you. This guy is..."

"Kinda dreamy," Prim says with a small smile. "What? Come on, Katniss, even you have to admit this guy is really cute."

"That's enough, Primrose," my mother scolds. "Go make up some pine bark tea for our...guest." Prim shrugs into the kitchen and my mother turns her attention to me. "Now. What do you mean you think he's the Doctor?"

I sigh. "He changed his face right in front of me. And that's who showed up. I'm pretty sure it's him. I mean, he says it's him but he's not the same. And now...I don't know. I didn't know what else to do so I brought him here..."

"Better here than a hospital," Gale says. "They'd dissect the hell out of him. You know...cause of the two hearts and him being all alien." I'm surprised at how calm he's being, given how much he disliked the old Doctor when he was around, but I'm thankful that I at least have an ally against my mother in this case.

We hear the tea kettle fall onto the floor in the kitchen. "Prim?" I call out. "Primrose!" If being with the Doctor has taught me anything, it's to always be suspicious when people you expect to answer don't. "What's going on Prim?" I ask, rushing into the kitchen, careful to avoid the shards of porcelain from the cup she broke.

She doesn't answer me, she's fixated on our window. Or more specifically, what is happening outside the window.

"What the hell?" Gale asks, coming in behind us. The three of us watch as balls of fire shoot from the sky and fall to the earth. "Katniss?"

I shake my head. "I don't know...but it feels weird. I wish the Doctor was here. He'd know what those are."

"They're meteorites."

We all snap our heads toward the kitchen door and see my mother holding up the man from the TARDIS. His hair is disheveled and he is paler than I remember, sickly looking.

"What are you-"

"He insisted on getting out of bed," my mother explains. "I tried to stop him but..."

"Still a bit stubborn," I say with a hint of a smile. But when he smiles back at me, I drop my face. "Meteorites?"

"Yep. Space rock, debris , bits of planet or space ship or aliens. Nothing all that out of the ordinary except..."

"Except what?" Gale asks.

The blond man looks Gale up and down a few times with narrow eyes. "Except..."

"Except they fell in a perfect pattern," my sister says quietly.

The man snaps his fingers. "Exactly. When a bit of space rock is broken up in an atmosphere, it scatters. But these all fell in same direction to the same place. Seems a bit suspicious, wouldn't you say?"

"Why is it here now?" I ask, staring down this imposter in my house.

"That's not the question," he counters. "Nor is the question 'what is it' or 'what does it want.'"

I sigh, already tired of this one's way of not answering my questions. It's all too familiar from an all too unfamiliar face. "Then what is the question?"

"The question, Katniss Everdeen, is how did they find us? Now, who wants to go meteorite hunting with me?" He asks, his eyes sparkling with the thought of a new adventure.

It tugs at my stomach in such a severe way that I don't bother trying to stop myself from following him when he rushes out front door. I'm responsible for him, whoever he may be. And if he's going after some alien that's following him, I suspect he'll run into as much trouble as my Doctor would have. I'm thankful, when we're walking through the forest that I'm still in my boots. Not that I could say the same for him, but it does make it easier for me to track his bare feet in the wet mud.

"No! No no no no!"

I hear him yell out from a few yards ahead of me and I sprint through the trees to find him lying on the ground in a newly cleared space, a piece of the meteorite in one hand, his other clutching his leg. "Oh my god! What happened?"

"Don't!" He insists – throwing his arm my direction to keep me away. "Don't touch me, I'm not finished regenerating yet."

"But..." I stare at his leg, at the way the veins stick out of his pale skin like sick branches of a tree, winding their way down from his knee to his foot. "If you don't get that taken care of..."

"I just need to get back to the TARDIS," he groans, throwing his head back against the ground. "She can help but I..."

I look at him, a feeling of dread overtaking me. I hardly know this man, this new version of my Doctor, but the thought of him leaving me so soon, of being replaced so instantly is too much. "Um...oh!" I rip off the bottom few inches of my t-shirt and hold it out to him. He stares at me with a look I've never seen before, but is so strong it causes me to look away. He must take the cloth though, because I feel it slip out of my fingers. "Um...if you..." I clear my throat, "if you tie that tightly around your leg it should work as a tourniquet."

"You're so..." he says in wonder, his eyes still trained on me as I peek over. "Thank you."

I nod, but even I know it won't be enough. He'll still need help getting off the ground and to the TARDIS. And so, against my better judgment and his direct orders, when I see he's got the tourniquet properly tied off, I grab his arm and help him to his feet.

"Katniss! Regeneration power is too strong for humans! You could die!"

"And so could you!" I snap back. "I can't..." The words catch in my throat. "Shut up and come on."

We hobble through the woods, his steps becoming more and more struggled. I can feel the energy draining out of his body but I refuse to give up. I have no idea what may happen if I let him die mid-regeneration so I can't allow it to happen. He's muttering, drunkenly slurring his words, as we go but I can hardly understand him, and he doesn't seem to be talking to me anyway.

My body begins to give out and by the time we reach the TARDIS, it's all I can do to roll him in. Whatever has been injected into him has spread further into his leg. His skin is more pale than ever and if I thought he looked sick this morning, he looks even worse now. All the color has drained from him, his eyes are a dull blue and his hair has lost any of it's luster that it may have had when I first saw him. The golden light begins to exude from his body again.

"You can't! You can't!" I yell, crawling toward him. I rest my ear against his chest, searching frantically for any sign of a heart beat, of life. "Please," I whisper, "I can't lose you again, Doctor. Please don't leave me again."

The gold light surrounds us both as my tears flow freely down my cheeks for this stranger.

_Wake up, little Mockingjay. Wake up_. A soft voice calls in my head and I crack open my eyes. I'm no longer resting against the Doctor's firm chest, but I am still in the TARDIS. On the floor. "Katniss? Oh! You're awake!"

I sit up slowly and see him, smiling as bright as day at me. "What...what happened? You were dead. Your hearts stopped beating."

He rests his hand over his chest. "They seem to be working now." He taps the console "thanks to the ol' girl." The TARDIS groans and creaks and he rolls his eyes. "You're so sensitive after a regeneration. It's like you hardly even know it's me."

I can't tell if he's talking to the TARDIS or me at this point because he is so new to us both. My eyes flit around and land on the chunk of meteorite. "What's that, then?"

He turns to look at it. "Oh! That. Yes, that's not a meteorite. Well, it is in that it's a solid piece of debris that originated in outer space and survived it's impact with the Earth's surface, but it's not just a chunk of rock."

"What is it then?"

"A spaceship."

I furrow my eyebrows. "What? How? What...what would fit in there?"

"Snotlings. Don't laugh," he chastises me, but even he has a hard time keeping a straight face. "Snotlings are a small creature, mostly harmless but incredibly mischievous."

"Like fairies?" I ask, reaching back into my memory of the mythical stories Prim used to beg me to read to her about fairies and goblins and other fantastical creatures.

He nods. "A bit. Well, not really, but you tried. Snotlings are the children of Pan, from the galaxy of DeltaHart7. They just got a bit thrown off course and the ship a bit...dismantled. We just need to collect all the pieces, put them back together and bam. They're back off to wherever they were headed."

"How do you know they weren't headed here?" I ask, uneasily watching the piece of spaceship.

He laughs. "I asked them. They apologized for poisoning me earlier. They were a bit scared and confused from the crash and they seemed to think I was going to enslave them."

"Enslave them? But..."

"Common mistake, I'm afraid. You see, Snotlings are mischievous but they are clever and hardworking, two traits that make them very valuable to less than reputable others. That's where these guys were escaping from when they got too close to the Earth's gravitational pull."

I stand myself up and walk over to the console. "You can see them?"

He nods. "Another way of apologizing, I suppose. Isn't that right?" There's a quiet chime from the meteorite that makes his eyes twinkle. "What about for my..." he looks at me, then back at the console, "for her. She's with me, you can trust her."

They appear before my eyes and as soon as I can make out their form, I begin to giggle. And once I start, I find myself completely unable to stop.

"What is it?" He asks, shifting his gaze between me and the Snotlings. "I don't understand..."

"It's just," I say, catching my breath and wiping the tears from my eyes, "I've seen so many aliens since I've been traveling and here they are...little green men." I start to laugh again and this time, he joins me. His laughter is so unlike the old Doctor's laugh, which was dark and raspy. Instead, this Doctor's laugh is infectious and sincere, as if it's the first time he's ever laughed. _Perhaps because it __is__the first time he's ever laughed with this face_, I think.

We retreat back to the crash site and collect the remaining pieces. Just as the Doctor implied, they all fit together like a three-dimensional puzzle. Once the last piece is in place, the egg-shaped ship begins to glow and shake in the Doctor's hands. He smiles at me and raises his arms up, giving the ship a bit of a lift. It flies off into the atmosphere before it pauses, then begins a strange, looping flight pattern that hardly looks like it would help.

"What's it doing?" I ask.

"Spelling something, it seems," he answers, his head cocked to the side. "Letters, see? P-E-E-T-A. It's a word of some sort, in the Snotling language, I suppose."

"I thought the TARDIS translated all the alien languages. Why isn't it in English? What does P-E-E-T-A stand for?"

He closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them again, there's a look. It's the same look the old Doctor had when he told me his human name. "Peeta," he tells me. "Peeta, it means 'Doctor.'"

"Peeta," I repeat, letting the word roll around inside my mouth, enjoying the way it felt on my tongue. But there's something about it that sparks a distant memory, a moment of deja vu. I can feel the harsh fall rain fall on my face, the gnawing pains in my stomach from not eating for days, the desire to end it all. And I hear his name being called out over and over.

"Do you like it?" He asks, looking at me intently.

"I've heard it before, somewhere. Like a memory or something. But that can't be, can it?" I ask, shaking my head. "Because this is your new face, you've never had this face before so I could never have seen it and heard that name together."

"It's impossible," he answers.

"Nothing's impossible," I grumble, remembering what 'Haymitch' told me the first time I told him his life and his adventures were impossible. He looks at me, his eyebrow twitching slightly at our shared words. "What's next for you, then?"

"Bit of traveling, I suppose."

"Alone?"

He looks down at the ground, bouncing on his now covered feet. "I've done it before."

I don't know what possess me to do it, but I reach over and lace my fingers through his. This stranger who isn't. This new Doctor that the Snotlings have called 'Peeta' who is so like and unlike my old Doctor. "We could do this together, if you'd like."

"You'll stay with me?"

Because I know it's true, I nod. "Always. Now...where to?"

He laughs and with a pull on my hand, we run back to the meadow to the where the TARDIS was waiting for us with open doors.


End file.
